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Column

February 7, 2007

Music teaching as praxis is focused on the well-being of students relative to musical action. Actions that do not enhance the well-being of students are not, then, considered praxial. This simple premise serves as the focal point for my e-column. In subsequent contributions I will discuss how professional practice in music education may or may not be praxial from my perspective.

This is my fifteenth year as a music teacher and my first year as a full-time college professor. I have been a member of the MayDay Group since 1999 when the late Steve Paul, my mentor and an original member of MDG, introduced me to the group. That was a pivotal point in my life; the interactions that I have had with others through this group have helped shape my teaching praxis in, I think, positive ways for myself and for my students.

Of course, my first year teaching music was hell. I remember yelling a lot. The materials and techniques that I had developed as a pre-service teacher did not even come close to meeting the challenges of a K-12 music teaching practice. Plus, much of what I had learned (for example, the zeal I had developed relative to the aesthetic ideal) proved problematic when I tried to put it into practice.

The school-reform wave that teachers were enduring at the time I began my career was William Glasser's Quality Schools movement. Glasser took Maslow's hierarchy of human needs and condensed and leveled it into five basic and somewhat equal needs: survival, love and belonging, freedom, power, and fun. In a Quality School teachers council with students about how their needs are or are not being met by the curriculum and/or their own behaviors. Through this process, it gradually became apparent to me that much of what I was providing for my students in music classes was simply not fulfilling their needs. That's when I became a critical theorist. I began questioning many of the standard practices perpetuated in music teacher education and by professional organizations. I tried to change what I was doing to make it more needs fulfilling for my students and that, as they say, made all the difference.

One of the professors in my doctoral program once said that he had taught for nine years and had enjoyed every day of it. I can't say the same thing at this point (maybe as my memory fades that will change). But, all in all, I would not trade my fourteen years as a public school music teacher for any other life course. It means a lot to me to have developed a music teaching practice-a praxis that seems to have had a positive influence on the well-being of many of my students.